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                              A MAGAZINE OF FICTION, POETRY & MORE!
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     ZYGOTE
            IN MY
                COFFEE.COM

ISSUE #36
 
   $O.OO
April 2005
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                                   ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM
                        
***BIO*** Adrienne Lewis edits the Paradidomi Review and is founder of The Rooftop chaplet series. Her work has appeared in various print and literary venues including the Hiram Poetry Review, Controlled Burn, Poetry Midwest, the Poetry Super Highway, and Poets in Their Thirties. Her first collection of poetry, Coming Clean, was released in 2003 (Mayapple Press); a new collection, Compared to This, is forthcoming from in 2005 (Finishing Line Press). Lewis teaches English at Kirtland Community College in Roscommon, Michigan.  Check out her website at:  www.adriennelewis.freeservers.com
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Weather Report
by Adrienne Lewis
They are calling for six inches tonight,
putting out the alert to stave off early morning
drivers bent on heading to work,
who don’t want to lie in bed a few more hours
with the one they’ve lazed near most of their lives.  

She would like to get going,
meet the new day and cast off
the old, run aground in white
on some back road thick with possibility,
and be rescued by a man with strong arms, a truck
that leaves a preemptive wake, plows through
how everyone else sees her.

She would like to run away to some warm place,
where snow doesn’t fall six months each year,
where chains don’t wrap themselves around
the forward movement of things.

Only a few months ago, the moon was swaddled
in October’s gray blanket.  She sat
on the porch watching farmers
harvest bending rows of corn.
Their tractors, bright spots in the darkness—

               Even those without floodlights seemed so sure
               of the paths they had planted.

Fat snowflakes settle in layers on concrete. She tries to tempt fate,
swerves just a bit;
the car’s rear tires spin out.
She turns the wheel

               into the back slide,
                         to the right

               into the back slide,
                         to the left,

to its original position. 

She is like that:

(stanza break)

               Of two minds
               Of two directions.  

After the farmers finished their harvest,
she wanted the fields high again
so she could lose herself
in their rustlings.

And now she just wants to forget the other seasons,
exist only in this moment, this snow,
the way it is falling
               like she wants to—

               softly, without a sound,
               without harming anyone.